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Marketing Communication Plans

Web Services often works with a client on campus who wants to do a lot with their website. What's missing is an overarching plan for communication using web, print, social, TV and/or radio and what it takes to produce that content.

For a select group we've pulled them aside and encouraged the development of a marketing communications plan.

Using a template from Kansas State, Web Services has adopted this strategy to strengthen the ability of a department or service to communicate and see return on that investment.

It involves capturing what many times is already in the head of the client. The immediate need is to share it with their staff, but the real benefit comes from when new staff arrive or outside departments team up on more functional tasks. It means these partners can jump straight into creating content with intent and measure results.

Examples

We've worked with Campus Planning & Development, Inclusive Excellence, Athletics, College of Business, University Personnel, Camp SEALab and the Campus Advocate's office.

In many cases, we've been able to take fully flushed out plans, create marketing campaigns that go beyond just their website (e.g. print brochures, mailing lists), and measure results that are tangible and usable.

For example, Campus Planning & Development used their plan to increase awareness of their Master Plan Revise, and much of their success has resulted into people attending their forums.

Template

Here's how the plan works:

Start with an analysis of what your group can do.

Capture your goals.

Think in detail about the target audiences for your content.

Develop the key messages you need to communicate, no matter where that content shows up (e.g. web vs. print).

Think about overall strategies and the tactics that will work 6-12 months out (e.g. Are students still using Snapchat?).

Measure the results of your hard work.

Presentation

We just wrapped up a two-part presentation in the Technology Open Lab called "Creating a Marketing Communications Plan."

Great marketing communications depends upon great composition of words, audio or video that convinces the visitor to act. The effect is return on investment (ROI).

Effect

There four ways to measure the effect of your marketing campaign: eyeballs, endorsement, engagement & effect.

In some cases, you might just want people to see your content (e.g. pageviews, impressions). Other times you might want to see someone's positive or negative endorsement (e.g. likes, shares). Infrequently you want to see people engage in evaluating your content (e.g. comments, discussion threads).

But ultimately you want to see some kind of conversion from just reading the content to acting upon it. This could be a visitor downloading a file, purchasing a ticket, or attending an event.

For example, if you are the College of Business, you want people to attend an important faculty presentation. If you are Athletics, you want students to see a basketball game. If you are IT, you want someone to download antivirus software.

Let us know if you would like to develop a marketing communications plan by writing to webservices@csumb.edu

Switching the body text to a sans serif font increases legibility, which is a measure of how easy it is to distinguish one letter from another. Characters in a sans serif typeface don’t have the tails that serif typeface characters have, which adds space between characters making them easier to read.

Changing the header font to a wider sans serif typeface improves legibility because header characters are no longer compressed, which makes characters difficult to read. We also adjusted the font size of all headers to improve readability, which refers to how easy it is to read words, phrases, blocks of copy such as a book. With…

On Monday, May 22, 2017, Web Services will improve its editor used to create content in csumb.edu.

This will be the first significant improvement to the editor since we launched the last redesign in February 2015.

In addition, we will provide some significant updates to how we create and display key elements, including:Improving how events get made, shared across campus, and displayed on the page.Enabling the ability to "clip" content from one CSUMB site and used on another.Improving how news is displayed on a page.Introducing several new content blocks that will provide more functionality.
Test the new editor
You can test the new editor on a separate site with duplicated content. Our internal user experience team is testing as well and we encourage you to play with it until it breaks. Then tell us about it at webservices@csumb.edu

We will also hold presentations at upcoming Technology Open Labs starting May 5 and running through May 19. Each lab will hold a presentation at …

Coming on Monday, May 22, when we go live with the new editor , you will see a new editing block called “clipping.”

You will be able to clip individual blocks on a page and insert them into your own page. This allows you to publish content that belongs to someone else, and when they update it, the content updates on your page as well.

Screenshots
To start clipping start by adding the clipping block to the page where you want the content of another page.

After adding the clipping block, begin clipping by clicking the begin clipping button.

After clicking "Begin clipping" you will now be in clipping mode. You can navigate to the page with the content you want to clip by using the site's navigation or if you already know the URL you can enter the full URL.

When you are on the page you clip by clicking the "clip part of this page" button to be able to select the blocks you want to clip from the page.